Authors: Lauryn April
C
harlie was waiting for us on the common when we arrived. She stood nervously with her arms crossed over her orange ALH tee. Brant had parked around the block from my house the night before, and he left his car there that day as we drove together in my Scion. When we parked at school, I noticed that there were few cars in the parking lot. I’d never been to school that early before and it was strange seeing it so empty, so quiet. It was like a ghost town from some old Western movie, I could even imagine tumbleweeds blowing across the sidewalk.
Once Brant and I met up with Charlie, we made our way into the school. We walked quietly side by side, watching the few students that were there pass us by. An odd kind of silence came over all of us during that short walk through the front doors and down the hall to the basement entrance. It felt as if what we were doing wasn’t real. Like it was just something imagined in a dream. It felt as if I was watching the events around me on a television screen and the unnerving quiet that surrounded me was from setting it to mute. However, none of us were sleeping, we weren’t watching some show. It was real, but despite knowing that, it still felt illusory.
“Ready?” Brant asked as he picked the lock to the basement door.
Wordlessly, Charlie and I glanced at one another then he opened the door and we followed him down. As I moved into the fluorescent-lit basement of the school, it felt as if I were in a trance. One foot in front of the other, stepping on dusty cement steps, my hand held the metal railing and I listened to the soft nothingness that floated through the air. If anyone else was in the basement with us, there was no sign of them.
Brant and I followed Charlie as she led us through the basement so that we were directly below the gym. We walked down a hallway where dozens of pipes created a maze above our heads, and the sound of rushing water flowed into my ears. We past a door that was marked ‘Boiler Room’ then made our way around a sharp corner. I saw bright blue wrestling mats stacked against the wall, and a rack of weights, bins filled with basketballs, and a gymnastic horse. My eyes rolled over every piece as I scanned the room. Then I stopped. The gym equipment, exercise bikes and baseball bats, they blurred into the background as if my eyes were the focusing lens of a camera and readjusted to look at something else. It was then that I saw him, saw it, all of it. It was that image that knocked me out of my trancelike state and back into reality. I blinked as if hoping that it all were just a mirage before me, but it didn’t vanish from my sight.
In cartoons, bombs were always made of bright red sticks of dynamite and large round ticking clocks. I hadn’t really expected to see anything like that down there, but I hadn’t expected to see what I did either. Sometimes on TV, in spy shows, or in the movies, you see these tiny little bombs, small constructs of wire and a play-dough-like grey brick of C4 that, despite their size, seem to be able to destroy entire city blocks. This wasn’t like that either. What I saw before me was a massive construct of gallon jugs that once held milk but had been emptied and refilled with an amber-colored liquid. There were wires and duct tape wrapped around the structure, spiraling from one piece to another like taffy twisting on a pull. I don’t know enough about bombs to say what every piece did, but I did know that there were a lot of explosives, more than enough to destroy the school gym.
Eric Thompson was staring down at the thing he had created. I could only see the side of his face, his plump cheeks, and thick brow. His hair was greasy and black; his shoulders were hunched and brooding. He turned to us and I saw his eyes. I was expecting them to be black and empty, but they weren’t. They were deep and filled with pain and confusion which seemed to visibly swirl around within his brown orbs. He looked over the three of us and for a moment I thought he looked relieved. I’d later come to realize that he wasn’t looking to have someone stop him as I’d thought at the time, he wanted someone to see what he was doing because he wanted it to be known that it was him who’d done it.
It’s too late
, he thought.
“No, Eric, it’s not too late, you don’t have to do this.”
His eyes darted to mine, looking surprised. He was wondering how we got in the basement, then he shook his head. “Yes, I do… I have to show them.”
“Not like this. This isn’t the answer.”
His lips twisted into a frown and he shook his head. “Then what is?” He grew angry and I saw his plump cheeks flush red, “What will it take to make them see? Nothing.”
“If nothing will make them see, then why do this?” Charlie asked.
Eric let out an agitated growl. “Because they deserve to die.” His answer was cold and his words sent a shiver through me that was as cold as ice. “This isn’t just about me, it’s not about revenge. It’s about showing them that I’m someone.” His hand was fisted and he pounded it against his chest as he spoke.
“No one deserves to die like this,” Brant said.
Slowly, I took a step toward Eric, my eyes steady and unmoving from his form. “Eric,” I began.
“Don’t, it’s too late now. It’s all set to go… You can’t stop us.”
“No, it doesn’t have to be like…” My words drifted off like an echo falling away into oblivion. I paused and could feel the crease forming between my brows.
Us…
“Us?” Suddenly it rushed back to me, the voice from the library, the voice that wasn’t quite Eric Thompsons.
It won’t be a big enough explosion, we need more.
We, I thought, we, I had thought about that very sentence a thousand times over and never before had the word ‘we’ stuck out. How could I have missed that? We should never have been looking for one bomber; we should have been looking for two.
Oh God, there’s two of them
, Charlie thought and similar realization passed through Brant’s mind.
“Eric, who else is working with you?”
“I said it doesn’t matter now.”
I have to do this.
Eric’s eyes were back staring at his bomb like it was the accumulation of his life’s work.
Ivy, we’re running out of time. People are gonna start showing up in the gym soon
, Brant’s voice rang in my mind. He was right.
“Eric, I can’t let you do this.” He took a step back then and I saw him reaching for something. “Charlie, where’s the most likely place for the other bomber to be?”
“Um,” she said and froze.
“Charlie,” I said again more firmly.
“Uh, the locker rooms… probably the boys, you’d risk running into Farrow in the girls.” I watched Eric as she spoke, and saw the slight widening of his eyes.
She still won’t get to him in time, I’ll keep them here
, he thought, and I knew that was it.
“Eric, please, there has to be something… you can’t really want everyone dead.”
“It’s not about them… they’re just a means to an end.”
Again his worlds chilled me. I realized there was no reasoning with him. “Brant,” I said and slowly he took a step toward Eric.
Right then, on to plan B.
Brant moved forward and Eric took another step back. He and Brant stood like that for a moment, stuck in limbo where they were both weary of the other’s movement. Brant, ready to attack him and Eric, ready to dive for the trigger of his bomb in a last attempt to keep his plan from completely going under. The air was tense and thick with anticipation. We were all dominoes standing in a circle, waiting to see who would be the first to tumble and set the rest of us off into our actions. Then finally it happened.
I’m not sure who moved first, if it were Brant or if Eric had moved for the trigger to the bomb, but suddenly Brant was flying in the air and hit Eric in the chest. He wavered for a moment, unsteady on his feet. I saw him reach out toward the bomb again, but now Brant had him knocked to the floor. To my right, Charlie was dialing her phone. I looked back to Brant and saw him seemingly take the upper hand. He looked to me for a moment, just a quick glance.
“Go!” he shouted and I was off.
I think I’d been waiting for that, like a swimmer standing at the edge of the pool waiting for that gun shot. It took the sound of Brant’s voice to get me to jump in, but once I was in, I was all in. I ran through the basement and raced up the stairs, taking them two at a time. I could hear Charlie behind me, she was on the phone, but it seemed that she was making her way upstairs to find immediate help as well.
None of this had gone as I had expected. I had thought it would have been easier to talk to him. I thought I could reason with him. I thought we would have gotten there before he would have had any time to set up. I had thought that there was only Eric. When I hit the hallway, I stopped for a second to orient myself and then I ran toward the gym. More students filled the halls than before. Every minute, more kids were arriving. They were going to their lockers, standing in the halls, they were in my way. I pushed past people as I moved, nearly tripping over some, but I kept going. I wasn’t going to stop for anything. This was too important. I neared the door of the gym, it was only a step away, but then as it came into view, so did Tiana, Christy and Eliza.
I stopped dead in my tracks as did they. For a moment, my mind went blank. For a moment, I forgot what I was doing.
“Well look who it is,” Eliza said.
“I’m surprised to see you without Brant,” Christy added.
I saw Tiana look to her.
God, who cares anymore, Christy
, she thought.
“Guys,” I said, “I don’t have time for this right now,” I tried to get past them but they wouldn’t move out of the doorway.
“Jesus, Ivy, what’s so important?” Christy asked. “Maybe if you spent less time running around, you’d still have friends.”
I rolled my eyes then and pushed past them. As I entered the gym, however, I turned around.
“By the way, Christy, maybe if you spent less time being so self-absorbed, you’d realize that there are more important things in this world than yourself. Everyone and everything around you doesn’t need to be so freaking
perfect
all the time. Maybe then you could have been there for Tiana when she needed your support, but you don’t even know why she was really upset about me seeing Brant,”
Christy looked to Ti and Ti’s eyes went wide.
“Or maybe, like there’s someone in the guy’s locker room planning to set off a bomb and kill us all, not that anyone seems to have noticed that one but me.”
“What?”
“She’s not being serious,” Eliza said.
“Actually, yeah, I am, you should all go, get out, and see if you can get anyone to leave with you.” I turned and walked toward the locker room again.
“Wait,” Christy called out to me, “Where are you going?”
“To try and stop him.”
She stared at me with her mouth agape, but I turned from her and raced toward the boys’ room. A moment before I walked into the locker room, I heard her think about how stupid that was; but she still didn’t understand. This wasn’t about me. I wasn’t doing it to save me.
27
Feel the Heat
I
t was humid in the locker room and it smelled oddly clean, like fresh soap. Although, considering no one had used the locker room to change for gym yet that day, it made sense that it would be void of the oily smell of sweat. My shoes squeaked against the tile floor as I walked past the showers and toward the large open area of red lockers. Fear was making my whole body shake. I felt like a small child that had been locked in a closet, afraid of the sleeves of the coats behind me as if they were monsters in the dark, and the pounding of my fists against the closet door was the panicked rhythm of my heartbeat. As I walked through the locker room, my heart was beating so hard I worried it would break my ribcage. Then I heard a noise and held my breath, something metal clanking against the tile and a murmured voice. I took a deep breath and stopped walking. I closed my eyes and calmed myself. I could do this.
I opened my eyes with a newfound sense of self-assurance and walked around the corner. There I saw him. His back was turned to me, light brown hair sitting in a mop on his head. He was hunched over, looking at what appeared to be a propane tank. Even hunched over and facing away from me, I could tell that he was tall and seemed to be fairly fit.
That should do it
, I heard him think, and I knew his voice was the one that I had heard on the common and in the library.
Hearing that voice again made me angry and it helped me muster up some confidence. For a moment, I felt almost cocky, adrenaline was pumping through my veins. Adrenaline that started to flow the second I saw Eric in the basement when fear and reality had started to set in, adrenaline that had pushed me up the stairs and made me rush to the locker room. Now that adrenaline was just sitting stagnant in my veins as I stood still. It had me feeling hyper as if I were riding on a caffeine-induced sugar high. It had me feeling like I could say or do anything.
“If this were a movie, this would be that part where the villain explains his evil scheme, wasting a valuable thirty minutes of the film to tell the audience what they already know… he’s just a…” he spun around at the sound of my voice, and that was when I saw his face.
He looked me over, obviously surprised to have his plan walked in on, but I was more surprised by who he was. I didn’t know him personally, but I knew of him. He was the head quarterback on the football team. He was a senior with, as rumor had it, scholarships to schools all across the country. He had friends, a girlfriend, people who looked up to him. Some practically worshiped him. His life was seemingly perfect. He was Kyle Allaway.
“
You’re
trying to blow up the school? But… why you?”
His eyes narrowed on me and he sighed. “You were expecting someone else? How do you even know about this?”
I ignored his second question, “I was expecting… I don’t know what I was expecting, but it wasn’t you. You have friends here, people that care about you, why would you want to kill them?”
Kyle scoffed. “You think because I have people around me that, what? Those people actually care about me? None of those people, none of the coaches, teachers, friends, teammates, none of them care about
me
. They care about what I can do on the field, they care that knowing me makes them more popular. I can have a dozen people around me listening to every word I say and feel more alone than any one of them. You think any of those people that float around me really agree with what I have to say? They just nod and smile because it’s what they think they should be doing. They’re all sheep.”
“So killing them is the solution? What good does that do?”
“It will end this bullshit. The way people treat people, how I get praised like a god, but Eric gets knocked down and beat on. It’s not right, not any of it.”
I shook my head, none of this really making sense. There was no good that would come out of this, no one would learn, no one would be punished, they’d just be dead.
“Kyle, the only people that this is going to affect are the parents of all these students. They’re the ones that are going to be hurt by this. It’s not going to teach anyone here how to be better people, they’ll all just be dead, what good does that do?”
“It’s not about teaching them anything, it’s about giving them what they deserve.”
“They don’t deserve this, none of them… every one of them feels the way you do. We all feel alone sometimes, we all feel like no one really cares about us. We all say bad things about other people to make ourselves feel better. Sure, it’s not fair and it’s not right, but we’re all trying to figure out who we are. None of us know yet, so we make mistakes. We don’t deserve to die for that.”
He shook his head ‘no,’ but there was doubt in his eyes and in his mind. He wasn’t sure about anything he was doing and I began to hope that I was getting through to him.
“You didn’t see what they all did to him,” he said in a softer voice.
“Eric?”
“They would torment him.” I knew he was talking about the football players, who Eric had gym with. “Make fun of his weight, harass him physically, Ryan broke his nose when he knocked him down.”
“So you’re doing this for him?”
He nodded.
“Don’t you see though? You didn’t help him either.”
“This is helping him, when everyone is gone, that will help him, and others will respect us for what we’ve done.”
“No, you’re wrong… and, you’re just as bad as everyone else. You think this is helping Eric, this is going to put you and Eric in prison. Being his friend would have helped him. Standing up to the rest of the football team would have helped him. You could have stopped their bullying, but you didn’t, and I know why… You don’t want to be alone, it’s because some of them would have looked down on you for doing the right thing, and for as alone as you feel when you have all these people around you, it’s still better than being like Eric and being alone with no one.”
“No, this means more…”
“This means nothing!” I shouted, and that time I knew I got through to him.
His hands reached up and tugged at his hair, pulling the light brown strands to their limit. His face contorted into a flustered and agonized expression. I watched him pace, listened to his thoughts as they flew around in his mind, one contradicting another. Then finally he came to a decision, but it wasn’t the decision I’d been hoping for. His fidgety movements became solid and his eyes locked on mine. Unlike Eric’s painful gaze, Kyle’s eyes were a dead stare.
Then I have to die too
, he thought.
Hearing him think it only gave me a second more; one more second to process what was coming. One more second to move toward the door, to make a run for it, just one more second to try and escape before he set off the bomb. My feet seemed to move on their own accord as I watched him turn. For a moment, it felt like we were moving in molasses. His hands reached out, feet twisting on cold tile floor and squeaking. I turned, my hair flipping around my head, and I ran. Again my heart was pumping so fiercely I thought it might explode. My lungs were heaving as I breathed deep. One foot, two, three…I did my best to put space behind me but I knew it wasn’t enough. I rounded the corner and suddenly everything was silent. I’m sure there must have been some kind of sound. I assume explosions have a sound, but I heard nothing. I only felt the heat.
The heat propelled me forward. For a brief moment, I was floating motionless in the air, my feet off the ground. That’s the last I would really remember.
That feeling when you’re falling and you can’t catch your balance, your feet falling out from under you, arms flailing but finding nothing to grab. It’s that moment of weightlessness before you hit the ground where your breath catches in your throat, all of it enhanced by the knowledge that a bomb had exploded and fiery torment was rushing my way. I remember thinking then that I was going to die.